


A Sketched Outline

by allovernow



Category: Breaking Bad
Genre: Canon Divergence, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-13
Updated: 2021-02-13
Packaged: 2021-03-15 10:33:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,998
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28937067
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/allovernow/pseuds/allovernow
Summary: Canon divergence: Jesse's attempt to escape the compound worked, he found Andrea and Brock, and they ran.Afterward, there are good days and bad days.
Relationships: Andrea Cantillo/Jesse Pinkman
Comments: 8
Kudos: 16
Collections: Chocolate Box - Round 6





	A Sketched Outline

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SegaBarrett](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SegaBarrett/gifts).



There’s so much green up here. Torrents of it, flooding the ground and dripping from the trees, so different from the red-brown desert of home it’s like being on another planet. The sky, when it’s blue, is intense—but mostly it isn’t, because the sun here is a shy thing, coming out only when it feels like it. Not fierce and bleaching and cruel.

Andrea walks through the park after she finishes work. White bell-shaped flowers, like girls in confirmation dresses, line the path, and she finds herself stopping to pick a handful before she remembers she probably isn’t supposed to do that.

She glances left and right, but nobody’s watching, so she stuffs them into her purse and keeps walking.

On the other side of the park, near their house, there’s a little row of stores. One has a few bins out front, overflowing with discounted kids’ toys. Mostly little-kid stuff, too young for Brock now, but then she sees a sketchpad and a pack of coloured pencils, and she thinks, why not? He was good about it when she explained that no, they couldn’t afford to buy a new PlayStation right now, just nodded quietly and didn’t ask again, and he doesn’t pester her to let him bring his new friends from school over to the house.

At least this will give him something to do.

There are days when she thinks maybe it would be okay to let Brock invite a friend or two over. Maybe they wouldn’t get freaked out, or make fun of Brock for his weird family. Those are the good days, the days when Jesse is almost like he used to be, except that he smiles less and goes distant once in a while, staring over their shoulders at people who aren’t there.

On bad days, it’s like Jesse doesn’t know how to do anything but what she tells him to; like he’s hardly there at all, a sketched outline of the man she used to know, faded from being left too long in the sun.

Or in the dark.

* * *

When the knock at the door startled her out of bed, she knew it couldn’t be anything good. That kind of knock, at that time of night, only meant one thing, so Andrea double-checked Brock was asleep in his bedroom before she answered it and breathed out a shuddery sigh of relief at his sleepy, “Mom?”

“Go back to sleep, baby. Everything’s fine.” This was a nice neighbourhood, the kind where you didn’t hear shouts or squealing tires in the middle of the night and lie awake wondering if someone had been hurt. But Andrea grabbed the two-by-four she kept in the hallway, just in case, before she went to the door and opened it a suspicious crack.

She didn’t recognise him at first. Filthy and skinny and hollow-eyed, and behind that straggly beard, the jagged scars on his face looked like they’d been inflicted by the claws of something wild and inhuman. For a moment all she could do was stare.

He reached for her hand—hesitant, like he was expecting to be slapped back—and said, “We gotta get out of here, we gotta go, I mean, like, _now_.” His eyes were wide and fearful.

And Andrea had never really known how much truth she was getting from him, but she did know Jesse wasn’t a good enough liar to fake that kind of desperation. She hesitated on the doorstep for a moment, her brain cycling through all the problems. What would happen to the house? What would she tell her grandmother? What would she tell _Brock_?

“Please,” Jesse said, soft and pleading. Andrea realised he was shaking.

She laced her fingers through his and squeezed tight. “Okay.”

* * *

Today’s one of the bad days. When she gets home, they’re in front of the TV together, a pack of cookies half-empty on the coffee table, but Jesse isn’t really looking at the screen. It seems to take him a moment to focus, to accept that she’s really in the room. When he does, he gives her this apologetic little half-smile, and she can’t get mad about the cookies, even though Brock won't eat his dinner now, or the fact that the breakfast dishes are probably still in the sink.

Instead, she slides onto the couch between the two of them, prompting an indignant “Mo-om!” from Brock as he scoots over.

Andrea ruffles his hair, dumps the bags at her feet, and reaches for Jesse’s hand. After a moment, he gives this quiet sigh and shifts closer, like he’s giving himself permission to believe she’s really here. She closes her eyes and lets her head fall back against the couch cushions, stroking the back of his hand with her thumb as the low burble of the TV cocoons them.

She’s pretty sure his pinky finger got broken sometime between him walking out and showing back up on their doorstep in the middle of the night. She pauses, just slightly, when the pad of her thumb skates over the break, and his arm tenses where it’s pressed along her own.

Andrea doesn’t ask what happened. She never has; figures pushing for details wouldn’t do much good. Instead, she lets her head rest on Jesse’s shoulder, and they’re quiet for a long moment.

That’s when she remembers the white flowers, probably wilting by now, and reaches for her purse.

One of them is kind of bruised, looking a little sad, but the rest of them are okay.

“Those are pretty.”

It startles her—Jesse doesn’t usually say much on days like this—but she smiles. “I should put them in some water.”

“I can do that?”

Andrea hates that it’s a question, that he so often sounds like he’s asking permission, but she fights back the burst of annoyance it sets off inside her. She doesn’t know who, exactly, deserves her anger, but she knows they’re not in this room.

“Yeah,” she says. “That’d be nice.” She reaches for the shopping bag and rummages inside, turning her attention to Brock. “Got you something, too.”

His eyes light up, and they spend the next half hour trying to recreate Brock’s favourite characters from the superhero comics he’s been borrowing from the local library. Andrea’s attempt at Spider-Man looks more like Mr Potato Head, but Brock thinks it’s hilarious, and it even gets a laugh out of Jesse when he emerges from the kitchen, so she decides it’s a win.

It’s only later, when she heads out there to look for a takeout menu, that she finds the bruised flower lying on the countertop, apart from the beer glass taking the place of a vase. Like Jesse didn’t think it belonged with the others but couldn’t bring himself to throw it in the trash.

She hesitates a second, retrieves it, and tucks it into the glass with its sisters.

* * *

They drove for hours, heading north until the sky was lightening around its edges and both of them were too exhausted to keep their eyes on the road. The motel where they stopped looked faded and moth-eaten in the grey dawn, stains on the carpet that Andrea didn’t want to look at too closely. Jesse’s eyes darted around the room like he wasn’t sure it was real.

She touched his shoulder. The sweater he was wearing—too big to be his own—had that greasy, filmy kind of feel that clothes got when you’d been wearing them too long, and he started a little at the touch.

“Why don’t you go clean up?” she said, nodding at the bathroom. Brock clung tightly to her hand; she was pretty sure he hadn’t slept in the car, vibrating with nervous excitement at the unexpected trip. “I’ll get him to bed.”

Jesse nodded and vanished into the bathroom. A long time seemed to pass before she heard the shower running, and a longer time before he emerged again, damp hair sticking up in all directions, dressed again in the dirty clothes he’d been wearing earlier. Maybe he didn’t have any others. Wherever he’d run from, Andrea guessed he hadn’t had time to pack.

He just stood in the middle of the room until Andrea sighed and got to her feet, swaying a little after the endless drive. Then he put out a hand, the barest brush of fingers against her cheek, hardly even a touch at all. Jesse had always been the gentle type, but now it was like he thought she might shatter under his hands, or vanish like a soap bubble on his fingertips.

She squashed down a quiet flare of resentment— _he_ was the one who’d disappeared, after all—and led him to sit on the empty bed, the two of them propped up against the pillows, not quite leaning on each other. The skin around his wrist was red-raw and warm to the touch, and she thought vaguely that they'd have to find a drugstore in the morning. Or the afternoon, because it was morning already, though it didn't feel that way. The yellow motel curtains turned the light golden, and the air was hazy with dust particles, soft-focusing everything, like how they lit scenes in movies to let you know it was supposed to be a memory or a dream.

This felt like that. Like none of them were quite real, a little family of ghosts hiding out on the edge of the world.

Jesse was still looking at her like she might disappear. She touched his face, and he flinched as her thumb brushed the edge of a scar.

"Sorry," she whispered.

Jesse ducked his head. "Don't say that to me. Please."

"Are you going to tell me what happened to you?"

He bit his lip, the gesture uncertain where it had once been flirtatious. "I don't— It's like— Shit. I don't know if I can. Everything, in my head, it's all—" He broke off helplessly, hands sketching a confused spiral in the air. "Scrambled, I guess. I don’t even know where to start."

"Okay," Andrea said. She was saying that a lot at the moment. Maybe she shouldn't be. Maybe she should be pushing more, asking more questions, not dragging Brock out of bed in the middle of the night on the say-so of a guy who wouldn't even tell her why.

That was when she felt how Jesse's shoulders were shaking, realised he was swallowing tears, casting worried glances over at the bed where Brock was asleep, trying so hard to cry without making a sound that he looked like he might burst. Andrea pressed herself against his side, deciding the questions could wait.

“It’s okay,” she heard herself murmur, again and again. She didn’t know if it was. “It’s okay.”

She was exhausted enough she slept, eventually. She didn’t know if Jesse had, but by the time she woke up, the crappy TV in the corner of the room was on and both her boys were sitting in front of it. Brock giggled as a contestant on one of those sadistic Japanese game shows fell into a muddy puddle, and a moment later, Jesse gave a low, surprised huff of a laugh, like it had been startled out of him.

“I hope you two didn’t have breakfast without me,” Andrea said.

This time, when Jesse turned to look at her, he didn’t look through her, and everything felt a little more real.

* * *

Brock abandons the pencils after a couple days, because that’s what kids do. The weekend’s sunny, and despite the quiver of fear in her belly, Andrea lets him head outside to kick a ball around with a couple of the neighbourhood kids. They might never be safer than this, and she can’t keep him in the house forever, so she settles for giving him strict instructions not to go out of sight of the house.

She hangs around sitting on the stoop for a while, reading the trashy crime novel she picked up from the book swap shelf in the break room at work. It’s kind of dumb and she’s already figured out who the killer is, but the predictability is actually comforting. Everything fits in its neat little box, and she knows how the story’s gonna end.

Plus, she can read with one eye on Brock and his new friends as they tear around the street. He glances back at her, once in a while, and he’s always careful to get out of the street in time when a car comes along. He’s a sensible kid. More sensible than he should be, maybe, but Andrea can’t bring herself to feel bad about that. The heart-squeezing terror she felt at seeing him small and ashen in a hospital bed is never far from her mind.

Still, she pries herself away eventually, because Brock will never be able to relax if she’s always watching over him. The fear’s a parent’s burden to carry, not a kid’s.

She lets herself back into the house, and blinks when she finds Jesse in the middle of the couch, knees drawn up, the sketchpad she bought for Brock resting against them. He’s frowning to himself as he draws, but it’s a different kind of frown than the one she’s gotten used to seeing on his face. Concentration, not worry. It makes him look less haunted, more like himself.

“What you drawing?” she asks.

He startles at her voice, angling the page away from her, quick and instinctive. When he glances up at her, his eyes are full of apology, but he doesn’t move the drawing back.

“It’s just—nothing. It’s dumb,” he says.

Andrea shrugs. “It’s not dumb if you like it.”

Jesse chews on the end of his pencil. “Guess not,” he says, but he doesn’t sound convinced.

Later, she finds the page torn out of the sketchbook and crumpled up in the trashcan. She hesitates a moment before smoothing it out. It feels like an invasion of privacy.

The page is covered in faces, twisted and monstrous. They grin, leer, drool. A few of them have fangs. There are black lines scored across the paper—like the bars of a prison window, keeping the monsters in.

Or out. Something about the faces with their predatory grins makes her imagine being a zoo animal, hemmed in in an enclosure while bored kids bang on the glass or drag sticks along the bars outside.

There’s a footstep in the kitchen behind her, a quiet exhale. She turns to face Jesse, the drawing still in her hands.

“I didn’t want Brock to see it,” he tells her. “Thought it might, like, freak him out.”

“Yeah, I guess it might,” she says. And, after a moment’s hesitation: “It’s easier than talking about it?”

He nods, gratitude in the way his face relaxes. Like maybe he was afraid she’d make him explain.

Jesse stops tossing the drawings in the trash, after that, though he never leaves them out where Brock might see them. Andrea glances at them, sometimes. When she does, she’ll see him go tense out of the corner of her eye, but he never tries to stop her. If it’s as close as he can get to telling her the truth, she’ll take it.

One picture in particular makes her stop for a longer look.

It’s her, and Brock, but from an odd angle—distant, her face half-hidden behind the curtain of her hair. Like the way they film things in horror movies, to let you know the killer’s stalking the main character from the shadows. Jesse’s drawn darkness closing in all around them, tendrils curling like clutching hands. Cold coils in her stomach.

“What’s this?” she asks, keeping her voice as light and level as she can.

Jesse doesn’t look at her for a long moment before he answers. She almost interrupts him, almost decides she doesn’t want to know.

“They had a picture of you,” he says, at last. “The people who—the ones I was running away from. So I’d know they knew where you lived. So I’d do what they said.”

Andrea freezes. It would be so easy to let panic take her over. There really _were_ monsters stalking them from the shadows all that time…

She forces the thought away. It’s been months since they left Albuquerque. If anybody was going to find them, they would have come by now. She breathes in, slow as she can, and out through her nose.

Jesse’s watching her face with something like terror. She allows herself another few breaths, and goes to him, slips her arms around his neck. A beat, his eyes big and disbelieving, and then he’s holding her back, hands settling at her waist, pressing his face into her hair and breathing her in like she’s oxygen.

“We’re here,” she says. “We’re fine. We’re not going anywhere.”

“Yeah,” Jesse agrees. “Yeah, I know.” His voice is a little unsteady, but he sounds like he believes her.

* * *

“What are you guys drawing?”

Jesse smiles up at her from where he’s sprawled out on the floor next to Brock. Today’s a good day. There are more of those, lately.

Brock scrambles upright to show off his picture. He got interested in drawing again when Jesse pointed out that he didn’t have to stick to the superheroes off the TV, and he could make up his own. The latest one seems to be part giraffe, which is apparently very important because he needs to see bad guys from far away.

Andrea tapes it on the front of the refrigerator. It’s only later when she thinks to glance at what Jesse was sketching.

It’s softer, more realistic, than his usual style, or at least she thinks so. She isn’t any kind of art critic. The colours are bright and warm. It’s her and Brock, in the sunshine, surrounded by green leaves and white flowers.

The lines are clear and solid. They look real.


End file.
